Austin Powers In Goldmember

Wednesday 24 July 2002 23:00 BST

James Bond's people objected to the use of "Goldmember" in the title. It plagiarised Goldfinger, they said. Mike Myers's people indignantly replied that a penis was not a digit. To compound inference with insult, they then added a scene to the third Austin Powers film in which a Japanese crowd panics as a Mini-Cooper in Union Jack livery skids across a Tokyo piazza with a papiermache green monster mounted on its roof (don't ask) while someone cries: "It looks like Godzilla, but due to international copyright law it's not."

Goldmember, however, looks like so many other (and better) films that even Hollywood wouldn't have enough lawyers to file suit against its makers. One thing it surely isn't: and that's film-making. It's recycling on an incontinent scale, achieved by the same process of intake and output that converts an indiscriminate appetite for junk food into waste product. It ingests plots, characters, styles and gags from every plunderable box-office hit, and celebrities from every talent agency whose $20 million clients are willing to work for scale as guest cameos in someone else's pop franchise and so keep their famous faces associated with success.

Before it's two minutes old, the film's "done" Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible; Gwyneth Paltrow's Singin' in the Rain and Britney Spears's - well, whatever it is Britney Spears does: no one has ever found out. Even Steven Spielberg shakes his Oscar at us in blessing before he (or, more likely, his stunt double) does cartwheels off the screen.

"I wanted to make a movie my kids could see," is the usual excuse for such real-live Hollywood icons exploiting their (copyright) looks for a degrading moment or two of screen time. My kids, if I had any, I wouldn't let anywhere near Goldmember. It is a show of incestuous freaks. Every ego-flashing character in it reminds you of some other film; every generic scene suggests an overdone rip-off posing as a homage. That our own national treasure Michael Caine plays Nigel Powers, Austin's dad who looks like Caine's contra-Bond spy Harry Palmer, isn't sufficient: he has to play him, to quote director Jay Roach, "like Dean Martin playing Engelbert Humperdink with a little Tom Jones and Sean Connery thrown in, a bit like an English Hugh Hefner". Caine's personal contribution: a spate of Cockney rhyming slang like an East End Maurice Micklewhite.

Michael Myers plays four parts, each one broader then the last: first, Austin himself in his naff psychedelic suits, epicene jabots, rockquarry teeth and paltry pretence at being a Cool Dude Brit. Then the alopecic Dr Evil, baldly played without the slightest apology to the late Donald Pleasence's sinister Blofeld (the Bond villain with a head like an egg that's cracked in the boiling).

Next, Goldmember, an epidermally challenged Dutchman who sheds his skin like a badly wrapped cigar and seems not to be the victim of the Midas touch so much as sun stroke: he nibbles the unstable particles as if they were cornflakes. And finally, Fat Bastard, the Scots sumo wrestler who looks, sounds and indeed farts like Billy Connolly with glandular and bowel problems. The emphasis throughout is on bodily functions or, rather, dysfunctions.

Like their owners, the usual orifices work overtime: the oldest gag in the world is performed in silhouette-behind a hospital screen and renders an illusion of a genital monstrosity worthy of the Elephant Man. Let our hero hide behind a urinating ornamental statue and accidentally interrupt its flow, and you may be sure he avoids detection by making good its water deficiency from his own supply - a drain on his resources.

Grossness generates even one of the more subtle sight gags: where dialogue subtitles are rendered partially illegible on a white background, making it appear the characters are talking dirty - when all they're alluding to is "shitake mushrooms". (Work it out for yourself: I cannot be clearer).

At least this childish smut has more wit than the identical oriental twins identified on their blousons as "Fook Yu" and "Fook Mi," names which have prompted many a giggle when they (or similar) appear on restaurant facades in Chinatown or T-shirts from FCUK.

Michael York plays Best Friend Basil Exposition. Thank God he lives up to his name, since the movie's so loud you can't hear the plot until Basil shouts it into Austin's eardrum. I won't divulge more: the optimistic distributors have asked me "not to spoil the general public's enjoyment". My own enjoyment was minimal, confined appropriately to Mini Me, Austin's doll-like lookalike and actalike alter ego (Verne Troyer), who's given nothing to say and thus proves that least is most. A new character, Mr Roboto, is played as he sounds by real-life celebrity chef and restaurateur Nobu Matsuhisa: presumably the stars will never go short of a free lunch.